Atomic Tonocracy (Inc NAM support)

DLC86 said:
Has anyone used Tonocracy lately? I just tried doing a couple captures and the upload goes on forever, the account sync doesn't work either (error 401)... it looks like they shut down the server.
Does this mean the project is dead? (Not that I'd be surprised...)
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Oh, no. Hope not.
 
What do you expect from someone not even being able to support a potentially successful commercial product?
Absolutely anything Atomic turns into a maximum shitshow.
Doesn't matter that Tom seems to be a nice guy - he simply shouldn't do any business.
 
My top layer of care is that I feel bad cause this is a small space and seeing someone try and fail sucks... but really, what was the plan here?
It was plagued from literally minute0. It got dunked on from the very beginning because you just can't release a product like this and expect it to go anywhere. They did all the hard and unique things like training calibration (which still hasnt been done by anyone else for NAM) as well as cloud processing all in one. They built a helix native/axeedit clone but it looked like wireframe. To get all that done im sure is no small feat at all, literally noone has done it since.

But the visuals and basic navigation are barebones. You could probably pay someone $400 to reskin the same elements and it would look better. But really they just needed some nicer flows to things here and there which in the grand scheme shouldnt have been that hard considering how much they did accomplish. Like getting 90% of the way there and stopping.

The release was weird, kind of just half spoken about (actually the initial release they thought taking literally every train ever and publishing it to the entire ecosystem was a good idea, insane), noone in the grand scheme ever knew about it. There was talk of a pedal that never eventuated, no paid expansions or reasons to give them money, just odd from every angle. Its like someone had a fixed fund and it just ran dry and then flopped out into the world and abandoned with like one or two minor updates. Again I feel bad writing this but these are all the things literally everyone (except for the beta testers) said on day one, this is not a surprise. I'll even go as far to say the army of beta testers were massively coping for this and not seeing the writing on the wall when it was so obvious to everyone on the outside.

I genuinely think if they had just released a NAM walkthru trainer where you could rapid fire do your reamps and build the metadata in a nice way and fire it up for cloud training, that alone could have been a $39/$49 plugin that held value. The cloud processing was nice but it was only for their format.
 
I feel for Tom, he's been a friend for nearly two decades. But that aside the amount of armchair quarterbacking from how XYZ would've made more sense is interesting.

Running a small MI biz isn't for three faint of heart.
Hell, even as an employee I welcomed the stress going back to doing music fulltime. And I made between twice (from 2000 to 2010) what I made last year. Not inflation adjusted

All the times customers know better, if companies followed all those hunches it'd taken even longer to get new products done.
 
Ed DeGenaro said:
I feel for Tom, he's been a friend for nearly two decades. But that aside the amount of armchair quarterbacking from how XYZ would've made more sense is interesting.

Running a small MI biz isn't for three faint of heart.
Hell, even as an employee I welcomed the stress going back to doing music fulltime. And I made between twice (from 2000 to 2010) what I made last year. Not inflation adjusted

All the times customers know better, if companies followed all those hunches it'd taken even longer to get new products done.
Click to expand...

This is all fine and dandy. And I have no doubts about him being a nice person, from all I know.
Yet, completely vanishing from earth for months or so when there's support issues to be cleared with paying customers of your hardware - well, that's just not the way you run a business.
 
Plenty of people probably think slate and Castro are tools yet they still buy slate and NDSP products, it’s not really a marker for a product. I mean it sucks when the people are nice and things aren’t working but the products need to stand on their own.

Not trying to be harsh it’s just realistic, a regular person would have no idea about the person behind it, they just see tonocracy and judge it for what it is.
 
Sascha Franck said:
This is all fine and dandy. And I have no doubts about him being a nice person, from all I know.
Yet, completely vanishing from earth for months or so when there's support issues to be cleared with paying customers of your hardware - well, that's just not the way you run a business.
Click to expand...
I was talking about Tonocracy
 
Ed DeGenaro said:
I feel for Tom, he's been a friend for nearly two decades. But that aside the amount of armchair quarterbacking from how XYZ would've made more sense is interesting.

Running a small MI biz isn't for three faint of heart.
Hell, even as an employee I welcomed the stress going back to doing music fulltime. And I made between twice (from 2000 to 2010) what I made last year. Not inflation adjusted

All the times customers know better, if companies followed all those hunches it'd taken even longer to get new products done.
Click to expand...
Idk, no one is saying it’s easy or that they have the answers.

There was just so many completely avoidable red flags that just made this product a total car crash from the beginning. Calling out those mistakes at least gave the opportunity to fix it up a bit and improve things. Everyone wanted it to succeed (at least until I read about developers not getting paid, and then I’ve just generally steered clear) but it was all just wishful thinking when you look at the execution of it.

A couple of critiques from forum dwellers is not nearly enough to make or break a product - especially something as ambitious as this. IMO another mistake was paying way too much attention to forums and thinking that would be enough to make it take off. There is still relatively little presence at all on youtube, for instance.
 
Ed DeGenaro said:
I feel for Tom, he's been a friend for nearly two decades. But that aside the amount of armchair quarterbacking from how XYZ would've made more sense is interesting.

Running a small MI biz isn't for three faint of heart.
Hell, even as an employee I welcomed the stress going back to doing music fulltime. And I made between twice (from 2000 to 2010) what I made last year. Not inflation adjusted

All the times customers know better, if companies followed all those hunches it'd taken even longer to get new products done.
Click to expand...
Who cares? Usually the people saying how they coulda/woulda/shoulda done things AREN'T actually customers (see Laxu in ever damn UAFX thread).

Its not the non-customer support that is the issue for Atomic; its the nonexistent CUSTOMER support.

And I get this thing is free so the level of support required is whatever. But also, with their track record. So.Much.Ugh.
 
MirrorProfiles said:
Idk, no one is saying it’s easy or that they have the answers.

There was just so many completely avoidable red flags that just made this product a total car crash from the beginning. Calling out those mistakes at least gave the opportunity to fix it up a bit and improve things. Everyone wanted it to succeed (at least until I read about developers not getting paid, and then I’ve just generally steered clear) but it was all just wishful thinking when you look at the execution of it.

A couple of critiques from forum dwellers is not nearly enough to make or break a product - especially something as ambitious as this. IMO another mistake was paying way too much attention to forums and thinking that would be enough to make it take off. There is still relatively little presence at all on youtube, for instance.
Click to expand...
Developers plural not getting paid? There was one, so that's the thing with weird off mouth.
 
Well, I just want to reiterate that I got a reply in less than 24 hours from Tom saying they were working on a fix for the servers.
So, I can't speak for anything else, but at the very least he is trying to put in the effort in this situation.
 
MirrorProfiles said:
Oh OK, that’s absolutely fine to shaft him then.
Click to expand...
I don’t know specifics but what I do know I’ve been paid many times way later than agreed on.
And yes it pissed me off.
And it happens a lot more with consultants than employees (yet it happened to me there too).

If folks wanted Unions they shouldn’t have broken them.
 
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